Street vendors selling an array of umbrellas, leather bags, watches and sunglasses on a New York street in 1979. Photograph: Frances M Ginter/Getty Images It was the same, I learned, with his house. In the course of the 20th century, as the urban revolution gathered force, the mass of poor people streaming into cities occupied empty land to which they had no legal right. By one estimate, 40% of new urbanites in the year 2000 squatted in cinderblock or cardboard shacks. Private owners now want their property back; governments see these shack-camps, if made permanent, as a blight on cities.
Mr Sudhir, who has squatted for 14 years, doesn’t see it that way. Year by year he has improved his house, and he now wants to secure these improvements by making his tenancy legal. “My sons and I have recently added a new room to our home,” he told me proudly. They’d built it each night, cinderblock by cinderblock. The anthropologist Teresa Caldeira has noted that such long-term family projects become a disciplining principle for how money should be spent over the years. The collective efforts are a source of family pride and self-respect. Mr Sudhir has a family to support, and a dignity to maintain.
His situation is a familiar one sociologically, if uncomfortable morally – ethical family values coupled to shady behaviour. The harsh conditions of survival can put poor people in that position; taken to a more violent extreme, it is the story told in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. I cannot say that my sympathy for Mr Sudhir as a paterfamilias made me accept being fleeced by him. Still, I wasn’t very angry. Need, rather than greed, drove him, and he wasn’t a self-righteous crook.
Our tea should have been an unalloyed moment – one old man sharing with another the fruits of a life of striving. But looking around us in Nehru Place, he concluded our chat with the comment, “I know I will be pushed out.” It was survivor rather than victim talk. “At our age,” he added, “it is not easy to start again.” But he then named a number of other places in Delhi where he might set up shop once more, illegally. What are the forces that seek to push out this admirable conman?
This is an edited extract from Building and Dwelling by Richard Sennett, published by Penguin, priced £23
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